Author: Lode Verbruggen
Executing transformation projects is key to thrive or even just survive for organisations in the current market. Your day to day operations gets you by today, but not tomorrow. Therefore, making sure that your projects are successful and deliver the required results should be top of mind of CxO’s. So, if these projects are so vital for your organisation, why are you still hiring paper shufflers as your project managers and PMO officers? I bet you know a paper shuffler. It’s the project manager who believes that a project consists of certain activities that need to be executed according to a predetermined plan and who thinks it’s only his or her job to just plan the resources and report progress to the steering committee.Today however, the world of project managers and PMO officers has evolved tremendously, due to 3 worldwide trends! Let’s have a look!
Millennial generation
Millennials will soon dominate the workplace, and this also effects the way projects will be executed.
Millennials use other methods of communication, as they seem to prefer social collaboration over one-to-one emails. Check-in meetings are great, email updates are helpful, but nothing provides a clearer window into the progress toward a goal than using collaborative communication tools like Jira, Smartsheet or Slack. Slack is a place where your team comes together to collaborate.
You can set-up different channels, organized by project and / or team to have great discussions. You create a database of shared knowledge and project updates that are within reach for all team members.
Not only do they communicate in other ways, Millennials like to do things in an agile way as well. As they recognize the need to respond faster and deliver more value, working with an agile mindset will be indispensable to achieve this.
Millennials will always be looking for ways to make impact faster and deliver more value. Projects that have ever lasting design and construct phases, will make millennials loose attention and drive them towards your competition.
Economic climate
Projects are not immune to the effects of the changing business climate. Project managers & PMO officers feel this more than ever through various consequences. These include scrutiny over budgets and over-ambitious timeframes, which leads to doing more with less resources at a quicker pace.
Meanwhile, stakeholders have higher expectations as they are depending on these projects to make their competitive advantage stronger. Evolutions in technology, such as analytics, internet of things, cloud-based platforms etc., bring their own set of challenges resulting in great complexity in project delivery and increased project risks.